By far the most important news in this round-up is that the Murderbot TV show is going to have a show-within-the-show of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. I continue to try to temper my expectations about the Murderbot show, but I could not be more straightforwardly excited for the Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. Here, also, is the Murderbot trailer.

I also devoured this article about cult murders, every paragraph of which is more insane than the last. After reading it, I then chomoped my way through this four-part podcast series about the cult in question and its ties to the neo-rationalist movement. Mad as a bag of cats, these people.

In other news, The Millions has posted their Great Spring Book Preview. Huzzah!

How long should you stick with a show to see if it’s going to get good? Daniel Parris ran the numbers and reports that the answer is six episodes. There you go. Question answered.

God, I love reading about art world stuff. Someone found this painting that they claim is a lost Van Gogh. All the experts are like “lol no.” The owners have sunk over a million dollars into trying to have it authenticated.

The new book about Facebook confirms exactly what you think. Facebook knows what it’s doing. They just don’t care. (The excuse they gave for their platform being used as a tool to enable genocide in Myanmar is that they didn’t have that many people on staff who spoke Burmese. I just.)

I expected to be amused (and I was) by this article about being the person who wrote those shitty tweet round-up articles for Gawker. But the piece is also a really thoughtful exploration of what it means to draw generalizations from what you’re seeing on just your one corner of the internet.

Not to be dramatic, but the words “personalized for you and your mood” in this article about an AI romance novel–writing company sent a chill down my spine.

“‘The disparagement of empathy is the flip side, I believe, of a deliberate effort to set up a permission structure to dehumanize others, and to narrow the definition of who should be included in a democratic state, or in a Christian community,’ she said.” Opposition to empathy is running rampant on the right, including the Christian right.

I want to go on a cross-country train trip so bad. Even this article about train food being aggressively mid (surprise surprise) has only piqued my yearning, because it’s also about community and homemade food and shared culture.

“To the extent that they are discussed at all, equality, justice, and liberty are instead framed as conversational achievements.” Always here for rigorously dragging Agnes Callard.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr told this journalist that he gave his son cancer by having him vaccinated, a claim that has no basis in fact. Robert F. Kennedy Jr fucking sucks.

“I’m Cursed With Knowledge About Zootopia’s Abortion Fan Comic, And Now So Are You.”

“Girlboss logic with a MAGA facelift.” On the feminine aesthetics of MAGA. (Would that all those breathless articles in 2016 about how Nazis wear their hair would have been this critical of why they are styling themselves that way.)

We never run out of things to say about Lolita. Here’s Claire Messud.

Take care, friends! It’s scary out there!

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The exciting thing about The Woman Upstairs is the intensity of its protagonist’s anger. Nora is an elementary school teacher and artist manque, who bitterly regrets the opportunities she has given up in her life in the interest of being “a good girl”. Into her life comes the Shahid family: the young son, Reza, is in her class; the mother, Sirena, a video installation artist who befriends Nora; and the father, Skandar, with whom Nora comes to enjoy discussing philosophy and politics. Feeling that she has been brought to life by these new friendships, Nora throws herself into the Shahids’ lives, baby-sitting for Reza and sharing a studio space with Sirena, where they each work on their own art and then, increasingly, more and more just on Sirena’s.

There is, of course, a betrayal coming. The extent to which Nora’s relationships with the Shahids are based in fantasy is not clear. Certainly Nora is projecting an awful lot onto those relationships, and Messud lets the reader sit with that discomfort. Nora of the present day, who narrates the story and looks back on those years with the Shahids, constantly tells us that she knows what we’re thinking, how we’re viewing her.

In a way this makes the uncertainty worse, because we know that we’re probably never ever going to find out what the Shahids thought about all this. Did they truly like her the way she liked them, or were they being kind, or were they using her, or some combination of those things? The uncertainty of this, combined with the certainty that betrayal is heading Nora’s way, infuses the book with (some slightly milder version of) dread. Nora’s describing Pride while acknowledging that she’s in a position from which society demands Humility, so you know that she’s going to pay.

I’ve read some reviews of this book that called it slow-moving which — I guess it is? At least, not a ton of events occur throughout the course of the book, and I am typically the first to complain about not enough events (cf my favorite show on TV right now being The Vampire Diaries on which ONE THOUSAND EVENTS occur every episode). But it didn’t feel slow, I think because Messud does such a good job of creating a sense of dread. You know Nora’s going to pay for the joy she’s experiencing; you just don’t know exactly how.

(I mean, I did. I read the end so I knew exactly how. But I still felt the dread.)

And now for my complaint. The symbolism of this book was, shall we say, a trifle on the nose. Nora’s artist friend, the mother/wife of the Shahid family, whose presence in Nora’s life lures Nora into believing there’s more out there for her, is called Sirena. Nora, meanwhile, has the same name of the protagonist of Ibsen’s The Doll House, an homage that I do not believe needed to be underlined by Nora’s artistic output being — yes! — dollhouses. There was just a lot of stuff like that, stuff that made me feel like Claire Messud did not trust her book to get its message across without slamming you in the face with its resonances.

There were also times at which I could have done without some of the commas. I love commas. You have to put a lot of clauses in a lot of commas before I will complain. Some of Messud’s writing was really lovely and precise:

But as she led me into their apartment, the thought that came unbidden was: Here is someone that I used to love. Or even: Here is someone who resembles, to a large degree but imperfectly, someone that I used to love.

I have felt that feeling before, and it was interesting to have it put into words, but at other times there were too many commas.

HOWEVER: I cannot emphasize enough that I like reading about angry women, and I really really appreciate what Claire Messud was doing in The Woman Upstairs. This is the same reason why I love Jane Eyre and the poetry of June Jordan. Women have a lot to be angry about.

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